DIOGENES: In Search Of An Honest Politician!

DIOGENES invites you to pull up a chair on this rainy day and read
posts from around the world.
The writing may lean to the right...but that's the way Diogenes wants it!
You may leave your opinion,
but Diogenes rarely changes his! WELCOME!

Friday, January 29, 2016

Obama doesn’t want to take your guns…honest!

If Americans have learned anything about the zealots who claim to seek â€œcommon senseâ€ solutions to the non-existent epidemic of gun violence itâ€™s that they will never be satisfied until Big Brother has stripped every law abiding gun owner of every weapon.
Last week, Coach is Right published â€œNobody Wants to Take Your Guns,â€ an article which reveals the true intentions of 2nd Amendment foes from the late Senator John Chafee to Handgun Control Inc, prior to its transformation into the Brady Bunch. And the agenda of the left has not changed over the years.
During a recent appearance on Boston Public Radio (WGBH), Boston Police Commissioner Bill Evans said:
â€œFor the most part, nobody in the city needs a shotgun, nobody needs a rifle andâ€¦ especially here in the city I want to have discretion over whoâ€™s getting any type of gun because public safety is my main concern.â€
Evans puts the arrogance of the left on full display as he presumes to decide what gun owners need and what, if anything, they should be permitted to have. Imagine the outcry should a conservative claim the authority to decide whether liberals need to speak and what, if anything, they should be permitted to say! What? Treat First Amendment rights with the same degree of contempt liberals have for our 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms?
Most Americans have caught on to the fabrications of our Liar in Chief as he declares his respect for the 2nd Amendment. During his campaign against John McCain, Obama said â€œI have no intention of taking away folksâ€™ guns.â€ Some three weeks ago, the left succumbed to a state of rapture over Obamaâ€™s shedding of crocodile tears as he announced his Executive Orders against

The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.
And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
"It is intolerable that human trafficking -- modern-day slavery -- could occur in our own backyard," Portman said in a written statement. "What makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers."
The report concluded that administration "policies and procedures were inadequate to protect the children in the agency's care."
HHS spokesman Mark Weber said in a statement that the agency would "review the committee's findings carefully and continue to work to ensure the best care for the children we serve."

Here’s What Genuine Tax Reform Looks Like

Left and right agree that the U.S. tax code is a mess. The men and women running for president in 2016 are offering reform plans, and proposals to fix the code regularly surface in Congress. But these plans are, and should be, political documents, designed to attract votes. To prevent todayâ€™s ugly bargains from becoming tomorrowâ€™s conventional wisdom, we should more frequently discuss the ideal tax structure.
The first goal of taxation is to raise needed government revenue with minimum economic damage. That means lower marginal ratesâ€”the additional tax people pay for each extra dollar earnedâ€”and a broader base of income subject to tax. It also means a massively simpler tax code.
In my view, simplification is more important than rates. A simple code would allow people and businesses to spend more time and resources on productive activities and less on attorneys and accountants, or on lobbyists seeking special deals and subsidies. And a simple code is much more clearly fair. Americans now suspect that people with clever lawyers are avoiding much taxation, which is corrosive to compliance and driving populist outrage across the political spectrum. ...
What would a minimally damaging, simple, fair tax code look like? First, the corporate tax should be eliminated. ... Second, the government should tax consumption, not wages, income or wealth. ...
We should also agree to separate the tax code from the subsidy code. We agree to debate subsidies for mortgage-interest payments, electric cars and the likeâ€”transparent and on-budgetâ€”but separately from tax reform.
Negotiating such an agreement will be hard. But the ability to achieve grand bargains is the most important characteristic of great political leaders.

CNN Stages Town Hall to Boost Clinton Candidacy

Who ever heard of a presidential primary debate or town hall meeting opening with a kiss on the cheek between the moderator and the frontrunner? It's safe to say that didnâ€™t happen between Fox News' Megyn Kelly and Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. And not just because he didn't show up for Thursday night's debate in Iowa.
But if you tuned in to the January 25 CNN Democratic town hall [1], you would have seen that kiss between the moderator Chris Cuomo, and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. And that was just for starters. The event featured softball after softball question in a continuous love-in for the candidates, but especially so for Mrs. Clinton. This was a far cry from the December CNN Republican debate [2].

Sales of Electric Vehicles Fall Far Short of Obama’s ‘1 Million By 2015’ Goal

In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama predicted that there would be "a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015."
But only 382,176 plug-in electrified vehicles (PEVs) have been sold in the U.S. since 2008, according to Hybridcars.com. That's just 38 percent of Obama's one million vehicle goal.
And although auto sales in the U.S. were at an all-time-high last year with 17.47 million sold, electric vehicles actually lost market share, dropping from 3.47 percent of all vehicles sold in the U.S. to 2.87 percent, according to the Electric Drive Transportation Association (EDTA).
Americans bought 9.7 percent more pickup trucks last year than in 2014, with Ford's F-Series remaining the top-selling vehicle for the ninth year in a row. 780,354 of them were sold in 2015, which was 14.6 percent more than the 753,851 Ford pickups sold in 2014. ...

Official: Some Clinton emails 'too damaging' to release! (and she said nothing was secret)

EXCLUSIVE: The intelligence community has now deemed some of Hillary Clintonâ€™s emails â€œtoo damaging" to national security to release under any circumstances, according to a U.S. government official close to the ongoing review. A second source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, backed up the finding.
The decision to withhold the documents in full, and not provide even a partial release with redactions, further undercuts claims by the State Department and the Clinton campaign that none of the intelligence in the emails was classified when it hit Clinton's personal server.
Fox News is told the emails include intelligence from "special access programs," or SAP, which is considered beyond â€œTop Secret.â€ A Jan. 14 letter, first reported by Fox News, from intelligence community Inspector General Charles McCullough III notified senior intelligence and foreign relations committee leaders that "several dozen emails containing classified informationâ€ were determined to be â€œat the CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, AND TOP SECRET/SAP levels."
The State Department is trying to finish its review and public release of thousands of Clinton emails, as the Democratic presidential primary contests get underway in early February.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, there is an exemption that allows for highly sensitive, and in this case classified, material to be withheld in full -- which means nothing would be released in these cases, not even heavily redacted versions, which has been standard practice with the 1,340 such emails made public so far by the State Department.